A blog about not seeing the forest (f)or the trees.

Revisiting the Inkwell of Lies

A month ago I wrote and published Donating Blood to the Inkwell of Lies, about propaganda concerning alleged rejection of Israeli blood donations by the Palestinian Authority. I posted a note to Twitter about it:

including a hashtagified compression of Magen David Adom, the name of the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross/Red Crescent. This turns out to have had the likely side effect of attracting the attention of a particular Twitter user who had something to add to the inkwell:

I read back into the timeline of Twitter user @pinksliptv and discovered someone who seems quite thoroughly right-wing and a devoted supporter of Israel. I followed a link from the user profile and it appears the Twitter user’s name is Muriel Campbell.

I’m posting here rather than engaging Ms. Campbell on Twitter because any sort of direct dialog would almost certainly devolve into a conventional, potentially inflammatory argument over whose side one is on where matters concern Palestine and Israel. Twitter is also too confining a space for what I want to say in response to her rather peculiar assertions.

Ms. Campbell is a supporter of the work of Magen David Adom, as this tweet (and others in her timeline) indicates:

As I stated in my previous post, I have no reason to believe that Magen David Adom is anything other than an honorable, forthright humanitarian aid organization whose name was attached to Israeli propaganda to give that propaganda a veneer of respectability. It is my hope that all such organizations operating in Palestine/Israel do so with the utmost integrity, and that they all adhere to the principle that care should be offered without conditions to all who need it, without regard to racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, and especially without regard to whose side the recipient of the aid is on. In particular, organizations operating under the mantle of the International Committee of Red Cross, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society and Magen David Adom, should cooperate to the utmost to bring relief to all who suffer in the region.

I have no means of verifying whether or not what I’ve reported to be propaganda is a lie or the truth, nor is it clear to me that the veracity of such claims matter insofar as such claims are used as propaganda. I also have no means of verifying the assertions Ms. Campbell has made. All I do know is what I believe concerning how humanitarian aid organizations ought to act, and I hope that if if Ms. Campbell and I can agree on nothing else, we can agree on that.